How do I install Stata for Windows on a network drive?

• Installation
• License initialization
• Creating shortcuts on workstations
• License renewal or changes

Installation

You will need a network license before you can install Stata on a network drive. Once you have your network license, you can install Stata directly from the server itself, or, if you have appropriate privileges, you can install Stata onto a mapped drive.

The installation procedure is the same as it is on a stand-alone workstation, except you select the appropriate drive. The default working directory (where Stata will store files and where it will look for any files it is asked to read) will default to the \DATA directory on whichever drive you install Stata. You will need to override this with the shortcut on the local machine.

License initialization

Once Stata is installed, you will need to run it once to initialize the license.

Once you have done that, you can mount the Windows share on which you installed Stata and run Stata from there. If the network share will be mounted as the same drive from all workstations, it may be easiest to create a shortcut to it.

Creating shortcuts on workstations

Let us say that you mount the share as the S: drive, and the Stata/SE executable is at S:\Stata9\wsestata.exe. Right-click on the background to bring up the menu, point to New, and select Shortcut from the list. Type the path into the box, or Browse to the executable. Enter Stata for the name of the shortcut.

Once the shortcut has been created, right-click it, and select Properties. Change the Start in: field to a local drive to which users will have write access. This is where Stata will attempt to store files, so, if the machine will be used by more than one user, you will probably wish to use a local directory to which all users can write or the user home directory specified using the environment variables %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%.

License renewal or changes

There will be times when your license needs to be changed: Sites with an annual lease will need to renew the license, the student version will need to be renewed, or the number of users may change. The procedure is the same in all these circumstances.

You will be making changes in the directory where Stata is installed, and you will need the license and authorization information that is on your License and Authorization sheet or in the email you received from StataCorp.

• Change to the directory in which Stata is installed.
• Right-click the STATA.LIC file, and select Rename from the menu.
• Change the name of the file to STATA.LIC.OLD
• Run Stata, which will then prompt you for your license information and recreate the STATA.LIC file.
• Once you have entered the license information, it is always a good idea to run Stata as an unprivileged user to ensure that it runs correctly. If Stata runs for the privileged user but does not run for the unprivileged user, check the permissions on the STATA.LIC file.